The Great Big Big George Book of Stories, page 1
THE GREAT BIG
BIG
GEORGE
BOOK OF STORIES
ERIC PRINGLE
Illustrated by Colin Paine
Contents
BIG GEORGE
Foreword
1 The Stranger
2 A Shock for Simpkin Sampkins
3 The Girl at the River
4 Worse than Dragons
5 How to Be George
6 Listening to the Sky
7 The Tilly Bird
8 Nightmares
9 Sludge, Bog and Grolyhoomp
10 The Walking Tree
11 Off with His Head!
12 A Marriage is Arranged
13 Down in the Forest Something Stirs Again
14 The Star Man
15 Trick or Treat
16 The Sacrificial Bride
17 A Wedding Like No Other
18 Into Battle
19 Goodnight, George
Afterword
BIG GEORGE AND THE SEVENTH KNIGHT
Foreword
1 Surprise For Two
2 An Outlaw Called Walter
3 Into the Greenwood
4 The Bargain
5 The Girl in the Pillory
6 Joanne of Nowhere
7 The Toughest Man in the World
8 George Builds a House
9 What Freedom is
10 Some Duck
11 The End of the World
12 Three and a Bear
13 Trial by Combat
14 Bring On the Dancing Knights
15 Midsummer Madness
16 The Jousting Favour
17 Knightly Ninepins
18 The Seventh Knight
19 Champion George
20 Arise, Sir Grolyhoomp
Afterword
BIG GEORGE AND THE WINTER KING
Foreword: Whispers from Space
1 A Stranger in a Very Strange Land
2 Follow that Star
3 Village in the Hills
4 The Boy at the Window
5 Grolyhoomp
6 Count Your Blessings
7 Sorcerer
8 Séance on a Sunny Afternoon
9 Boy Bess
10 The Grolyhoomp Song
11 It’s a Wonder
12 George in the Dark
13 SOS
14 Cockatrice
15 It’s a Knock-Out
16 Potion
17 Who Will Be Crowned?
18 King for Day or Two
19 Sir Solomon
20 Reunion
21 George in Danger
22 One Good Turn
23 Action Grolyhoomp
24 George Gets Mad
25 Miracle at Kingswell
26 The Spirit of Christmas
27 Something Has Changed
Afterword
Featuring
Big George
Big George and the Seventh Knight
Big George and the Winter King
BIG GEORGE
Foreword
This book is about England’s very first visitor from outer space.
It is the story of how he got his name and how, helped by the smallest of girls, he became the Biggest Hero England Ever Had.
These things happened a long time ago, in the Year of Our Lord 1103.
Close your eyes. Imagine that time …
The Norman Conquest happened only thirty-seven years ago, and now a Norman, King Henry the First, sits upon the throne of England. He has two and a half million subjects, most of them as poor as church mice.
England is full of dark places. There are deep, dark, trackless forests roamed by deer and wolves and wild boar. There are dark mountain regions where people are afraid to wander and wildcats hiss in the mist. And everywhere the people believe in the dark power of magic, in wizards and witches and the power of potions.
In this half-civilised land, mighty barons hunt in the forests by day, for sport. At night, hungry poachers steal through the trees looking for food.
This is everyday life in the Year of Our Lord 1103.
Nothing extraordinary is happening. But it’s about to.
Listen!
Do you hear that noise?
Something is approaching very fast. Heading for England.
Here it comes …
Chapter One
The Stranger
The noise of the crash was heard at court, a hundred miles away.
King Henry looked up, cocked his head and listened for another bang. His courtiers listened too.
When a second tremor did not arrive, Henry nodded wisely and said, ‘Meteorite.’ (Which was not a bad guess, really.)
His courtiers bowed low and replied, ‘Thank you, Your Majesty, for telling us. How wise you are to know such things!’
They all believed it was a meteorite because the King was the King and Kings Know Everything.
Five minutes later the bang was forgotten and Palace life carried on as though nothing had happened.
*
But something had happened – something big.
The Stranger had arrived.
Deep in the dark forest, a hundred miles from the King and his courtiers, a machine lay shattered and smoking at the bottom of a vast hole.
Moments earlier it had resembled a shooting star, fire bright, hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere in a swizzle of dazzling light. When it smacked into the forest the star went out. Now little green lights fizzed and sparked like glowworms, and spat puffs of smoke.
Somewhere in the hole, inside the wreckage, in the middle of the sparks, a noise crackled and a panicky voice spluttered gibberish on and off, on and off. Gradually the voice grew fainter, as if it was losing strength, then with a sigh it stopped altogether.
Pieces of the machine lay scattered far and wide among the trees. They too smoked and glowed in the dark night of the forest.
Suddenly the voice returned, screaming. It gave a final command and at once the machine and every scattered piece of metal shone with a blinding light.
Then one by one they shrivelled, the way cotton wool shrinks on a fire, twisting and dwindling until the machine was no more. The voice died too.
All that was left was a hole in the floor of the forest, and trees were flattened to twigs all about.
But there was nobody to see these things.
That is how the scene remained for weeks. Still nobody came to see.
Then one night the silence was broken.
Something stirred in the undergrowth, not far from the hole.
Something had been left after all.
It was big.
It was very big.
If anyone had been watching they would have seen something like an arm raised to scratch what looked like a face – a face covered at its top and bottom with something like hair, only this hair was striped blue and green.
A second arm reached out and pressed against the ground, pushing upright an object that looked very like a body – except that this body was at least as big around and as tall as a tree. The face rose above it and kept on rising. Something like a neck, like a swan’s neck that seemed to go on for ever, uncurled slowly and achingly.
As it did so, what sounded like a groan escaped from a mouth hidden inside the blue and green beard. In the silence of the forest the groan sounded as loud as thunder and it made the leaves shiver all around.
Very slowly, with many more groans to make the trees tremble, the whole thing rose up on two enormous legs. Up and up it surged, thrusting through the branches until its head was out in the clear air, towering against the sky and blotting out the stars.
Now at last the Stranger stood upright.
Rocking unsteadily on feet the size of boulders, he looked about him, blinking his eyes in the darkness.
If anyone had been watching they would have thought him the most extraordinary being they had ever seen.
The Stranger was almost human-like, apart from the blue and green hair and the giraffe neck.
Very like and almost a man, but not quite. He was bigger than the biggest tree in the forest. But the oddest thing of all was his face.
It was definitely a face and in many respects it was like a human face. But it was almost white and almost green – a pale greenish white – and it glowed in the dark. It nodded up there against the sky like a full moon.
Actually, it isn’t surprising that the Stranger looked like a man in so many ways. Because where he had come from, astronomers had been searching the universe for thousands of years, seeking a star like their own. It was like hunting a needle in a haystack, but in the end they found it.
Earth seemed so similar to their world that those astronomers thought that everything on it might be similar too. This made them very excited, but it was only guesswork. They had to find out if it really was true.
They decided to send an explorer, a messenger. So they built a spacecraft and aimed it at their discovery, with an astronaut inside – the Stranger.
It worked. Here he was.
But there was an unforeseen problem. The Stranger had no idea who he was, where he was, or what he was doing there.
In the crash of the landing he had been thrown clear of his craft, bumping through the forest and banging his head so hard that now he could not remember anything. And when his craft destroyed itself, there was nothing left to remind him.
He had no past, only a new beginning on an unknown
The Stranger had another problem too. He could not get his neck down.
His neck was supposed to fold like a swan’s but one of the bumps had locked it fast and now his head was stuck up high and shining like a lamp on a lamp-post.
After teetering on his shaky legs for a while, the Stranger thought he might as well go somewhere, although he had no idea where. So he staggered off, leaving his direction to chance.
As he went, he cut such a swathe through the forest that hunters riding there afterwards thought there must have been a hurricane.
All this a watcher would have seen, if there had been anybody there to see.
And there was.
Chapter Two
A Shock for Simpkin Sampkins
There was a poacher.
His name was Simpkin Sampkins, and he was very, very frightened.
Simpkin had pale, watery eyes and no hair and trembling knees. They had been shaking ever since the moment when, setting a rabbit trap, not far away he saw a tree rise up in the darkness and scratch its head.
That had scared Simpkin so much that he almost caught himself in his own trap.
‘Jumping fleas in a jam jar!’ he muttered, making the sign of a cross on his ragged tunic. ‘Bless my toes with honey!’
Simpkin Sampkins lay flat on his back on the ground, hardly daring to breathe, while what looked like more trees moved and merged into the biggest tree he had ever seen.
‘Oh, Mother, forgive me, for I must have been drinking,’ he moaned, ‘although I don’t remember it.’
Gazing at the enormous tree that swayed high above his head, looking as if it might topple on him at any moment, Simpkin began to cry and he began to pray.
He cried that he was sorry for every wicked thing he had ever done. He was sorry for stealing the miller’s flour and his daughter Tilly Miller’s honey, and for trapping Baron Lousewort’s rabbits.
‘I will be a poacher no more,’ he sobbed. ‘And bless my boots with beer but I will never drink alcohol again, for I am being punished with walking trees.’
The Stranger still hovered above him, so Simpkin Sampkins began to pray for a miracle.
‘Lord,’ he begged, ‘if I promise to be good for ever, will you please make this tree go away? Please?’
The moment the thought babbled from his brain, the tree moved.
It thumped down a boot as big as a hut, missing Simpkin by a hair and trampling his rabbit trap six feet down into the soft earth.
Next the tree stepped over him and thudded away through the forest, squashing everything in its path.
Simpkin Sampkins lay shivering, rigid as an icicle, for an hour. At last he got up. Peering into the grave where his rabbit trap was buried, he cried again.
Then he ran for his life, watched by a nearby rabbit that rubbed its face with its paws and grinned, glad of its lucky escape.
Chapter Three
The Girl at the River
Simpkin Sampkins ran until he thought he could run no more, and still he kept on running. He ran with a stitch in his side and his breath rasping. His legs bled and his hands stung from the briars and nettles that tried to hold him back.
He ran until he reached the edge of the forest and came to the first building on cultivated land. It was a mill, standing sturdily beside the looping bend of a winding river. Simpkin Sampkins had never been so glad to see anything in his life as this mill.
When Simpkin arrived, the night was over and gone. The sun was up and the river shone and the mill-race sparkled as it pushed and dripped over the mill’s great turning wheel. The water drove the wheel outside, and the wheel turned, grinding stones inside, and the stones ground corn into flour.
Across the river, inside the mill, Simpkin could hear the miller working beside the noisily grinding millstones, shovelling corn and flour. As he worked, the miller was whistling a happy tune.
Outside, the miller’s daughter Tilly was washing his clothes in the river.
The girl was young and small and pretty. She slapped the clothes on flat stones at the water’s edge, and rubbed and shook them. All the time she sang too as she worked, but the song she sang was a sad song.
Tilly looked up from her washing as something appeared out of the forest on the other side of the river.
What she saw looked like a bundle of clothes falling about. It croaked and wobbled and sucked in air. It flapped its arms like wings. Then it sat down and cried.
‘Simpkin, is that you?’ Tilly shouted.
She carried on washing her father’s clothes. She dared not pause because she knew that the miller would have a hundred other things for her to do afterwards.
‘Of course it’s me!’ Simpkin Sampkins wanted to shout back at her. ‘Who else would be out in these wild woods at this time in the morning?’ But the only sound he could make was a croak like a tired frog.
So he sat on the bank to get his breath back, and looked across the river at Tilly Miller.
Simpkin liked Tilly. He liked watching her. He liked her long yellow hair and the way she tied it back with a band of blue cloth. He liked her smile. He liked the way animals and birds trusted her. That, he knew, was a good sign. They didn’t trust him as far as they could spit, but that was natural, for he poached them mercilessly.
Simpkin wished Tilly was his daughter. He told himself he would not work her so hard if she was. He would take care of her far better than that greedy miller, who was so busy making money that he hardly bothered to speak to Tilly, except to give her orders.
And Simpkin knew that if Tilly had been his daughter, he would not have promised her in marriage to Baron Lousewort’s horrible son Bones when she grew up, as her greedyguts father had done. No, sir.
Simpkin had no children.
He had no wife, either.
Simpkin Sampkins had nobody.
People said it was because he was a loner, as if this had been by choice. But Simpkin had not chosen it at all, it was just the way things had worked out.
Whenever he felt lonely Simpkin talked to his friend Tilly. But he had no time to talk to her now because there was a tree on his heels.
Tilly was wringing out the cold washing when finally he came plunging across the river towards her.
‘What’s up, Simpkin?’ she asked.
Simpkin staggered up the beach with water dribbling from his armpits.
‘I’m sorry I stole your dad’s flour,’ he babbled. ‘Here, have it back.’
He hauled his poacher’s satchel off his back, dragged out a soggy bag and dumped it splat on the ground.
Tilly’s blue eyes opened wide with horror. ‘Simpkin, how could you!’ she cried.
‘It was easy,’ Simpkin wanted to say, but instead he said, ‘And I’m sorry I stole your honey, Tilly.’ He pulled out a dripping honeycomb and dropped it squelch on the stones.
‘You stole my honey? Why?’
Simpkin wanted to explain that stealing things was what poachers do. But instead his eyes filled with tears. He scratched his bald head. ‘I – I’m sorry, Tilly,’ he stammered. ‘I won’t do it again, I promise. Never ever. I’ve been punished – oh, how I’ve been punished!’
Tilly examined him closely. ‘Simpkin, have you been drinking?’
‘Not a drop has touched my lips, Tilly, and never will again. Now I have to go. There’s something I must tell people. I have to tell everybody. The forest is alive, and on the move!’
With that he ran away down a track that led alongside the river to the village, with his arms waving and his bald head bobbing in the sun.
Tilly Miller carried the clean washing into the mill house, where her father was waiting impatiently with a list of jobs for her as long as her arm.
‘Simpkin Sampkins is drunk, Father,’ Tilly said and smiled. ‘He thinks trees are chasing him.’
‘Trees will be chasing you if you don’t hurry up,’ the miller snapped, heading for the door, ‘and I’ll be behind them. I’m off to the village now to deliver flour. If you don’t finish that list before I get back you’ll be sorry. Understand?’
He banged the door shut behind him without even waiting for his daughter to say yes.
Chapter Four
Worse than Dragons
The miller did not get far. In fact, he got nowhere at all.
He had just finished harnessing his horse and was loading up the cart with sacks when he heard the sound of hooves.
